


A pettiness

by Lilliburlero



Category: Stalky and Co - Rudyard Kipling, The Night Manager (TV)
Genre: Canon Gay Character, Character Study, Crossover, Gen, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mid-Canon, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 07:10:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15813972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Corky, stung by Roper's rejection of him, reflects on his Illustrious Ancestor.*Advisory: canon-typical homophobia, mentions of torture and murder.





	A pettiness

**Author's Note:**

> This is TV-verse fic and may contradict details in the novel, which I haven't read.

Degeneracy. There were lots of varieties of it, apart from the obvious. The social, the financial, the socio-financial, for one. You needed no greater catastrophe than an unbroken run of younger sons to go from peer to peasant in four generations. Say the baronet begets a barrister, barrister begets a bank manager, bank manager’s son is a bit of a drifter, failed rock musician, roadie, it’s the Sixties, ends up a brickie, Bob’s your—well. That’s just an example, you understand, his crowd were always Army, career officers, and in fact the Illustrious Ancestor had only been promoted lieutenant-colonel when he was the age Lance was now, forty-three, and Lance had been out—well, he’d been _out_ quite some time before he’d left the Army with twelve years service, ducks.

Still, he wasn’t going to kid himself, what a falling off was there. His great-grandfather, Arthur Lionel Corkran (the medial vowel had been interposed, or restored, by Lance’s father, whose rabidly sentimental Hibernophilia had not obstructed his enthusiastic implementation of the Five Techniques upon internees at secret locations in Co. Derry) had been a military genius. Eccentric, certainly; erratic usually, the glory days of his career spent in Waziristan in the 1880s and 90s. Military historians still debated the value of the 'Corkerforce' detachment to the Caucasus Campaign of 1918, though all agreed it was a watershed, the end of an era, and Corkran one of the last madcap imperial adventurers. 

No wonder, really, that the strategic gifts, the reckless panache, were both diluted and coarsened in his descendant; after all, Lance had seven other great-grandparents, none of whose full birth names he knew, who were _not_ Major General A.L. Corkran. He wasn’t an eighth of the soldier his great-grandfather had been, not an eighth of an eighth, nor the gentleman. One trait they shared had perhaps strengthened in the line of descent—or rather, bloomed again recessively, because there was nothing of it in his grandfather’s bank-breaking philoprogenitiveness or his father’s compulsive, joyless womanising—but there were still plenty around who would call that degeneracy too. On the one hand, Lance was lucky, times had changed, he didn’t have to find and court a boot-faced general’s daughter, service her once a fortnight until she squeezed out a brat or two as respectable cover for a revolving-door menage à trois with a series of Sikh NCOs. On the other, times hadn’t changed enough, they hadn’t changed nearly e-fucking-nough. 

No matter how loyal, no matter how circumspect, you were still always considered a risk. The miasma of blackmail hung around, even if you were dog-bites-man, pope-shits-in-the-woods, bear-on-the-throne-of-the-Holy-See, one hundred and eleven per centum proof against it. Always susceptible to replacement. Lance tolerated that, went with the territory. But this, this was intolerable: usurped by the golden boy, snake-hipped snake in the grass, flickering out of nowhere, a hole in the ground, nameless, too many names, nothing to recommend him. Except his straightness. And the only proof they had of _that_ was proof of his treachery too, the ultimate treachery in this damfool straight world. It was bloody hilarious, everyone assumed—even Dickie, who should know him by now, know his tastes—that he was dying of lust for Snake Boy. Straight people always assumed you wanted the straight ones, _so_ self-aggrandising. Wouldn’t touch him with yours, dearie; wouldn’t touch him with Frisky’s lash or Tabby’s spiky one. Imagine that soulful, melancholy, slightly wonky face looking back at you, put you right off your stroke, that would, you’d have to stick a bag over it. And that wasn’t Lance’s thing at all: he was as sickeningly vanilla as a Walls factory, when it came down to it. Work was work and play was play, and never the twain shall meet. 

It was Dickie who had the crush, the big boring gay cliché of being in love with a straight boy, wanting him for his straightness, which would evaporate if you got what you wanted, so it could never happen, the ideal, the perfect, the unutterably tedious fantasy. But better than the other arguably gay thing they were doing, sharing a woman—was it gay if one of you didn’t know he was doing it? But Dickie knew. He just didn’t know he knew yet, and that was good old faithful Corky’s job, to make the unknown known into a known known. He sincerely regretted the inevitable collateral damage—he was truly fond of Jed, though she was too tall, too tall altogether. Perhaps the Illustrious Ancestor could have found some way, some artful, chivalrous way, to explode Dickie and Snake Boy’s burgeoning romance without giving her this last gift, seven foot of contested Kurdistan, to share in perpetuity with her golden traitor. But it was beyond him, who was, when all was said and done, only an eighth part Stalky Corkran. 

There she was now, strolling out to the poolside in one of her asymmetrical, translucent sacks. That girl could wear a body-bag with impeccable style, which one had to say was _felicitous_ , in the circumstances. Despite her pallor, she never seemed to get burnt, soaked up sun like a reptile, radiating it out again, thousands of iridescent scales, but no armour. 

_The black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous_. That was a quotation from something, but he couldn’t place it. He watched her a moment more, with the deep passion that could come only from sexual disinterestedness, then turned his head away, reaching into the desk drawer for a fresh burner phone.

**Author's Note:**

> Stalky's Army career follows the pattern of his model, [Lionel Dunsterville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Dunsterville).
> 
> 'The black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous': D.H. Lawrence, 'Snake', from which the title is also taken.


End file.
